Asus Eee Pad Slider review

Cameras

I’m not going to spend too long talking about the 5-megapixel rear camera on the Slider because the idea that you would hold this thing up and take a picture in public is insane. It’s not only heavy and awkward, but it just isn’t worth the effort since the picture quality is beyond disappointing. Every image I shot, whether they were inside or outside, was grainy and slightly blurry. All the evidence you need is in the gallery below. By the way, the camera is on the bottom of the keyboard so it hits whatever surface you sit it on when in keyboard mode — there are some rubber feet on there to protect it. The front-facing 1.2-megapixel shooter is what you’d expect — you’re not going to want to take your new Facebook Timeline shot with this, but it is fine for video chatting or checking your teeth for food.

Screen

Like the Transformer, the Slider’s 10.1-inch, 1280 x 800-resolution IPS display is very high quality and quite impressive for the price. Viewing angles are extremely wide, which is of the utmost importance since you’ll be looking at the screen from a 45-degree angle (if not slightly greater) at all times because of the fixed positioning of the hinge. It’s also sufficiently bright, although not as beaming at max brightness as the Galaxy Tab 10.1 or the iPad. It’s also pretty handy that you can adjust the screen brightness using a keyboard shortcut (Fn+B and Fn+N).

However, my major complaint about the screen is the larger bezel. The display is flanked by 1.2 inches of vertical frame — or at least, that’s the measurement from the widest part of the slightly curved screen edge. It’s obvious that this was a move to accommodate a wider keyboard, but the result is an awkward looking display when the keyboard is hidden and you hold the tablet in either landscape or portrait mode.

Software

The Slider runs the latest version of Honeycomb (3.2) with some minor adjustments from Asus. The most noticeable tweaks come with the slightly redesigned back, home, and recent apps buttons, the aforementioned software keyboard, and that unique "MyWater" wallpaper pictured above. The water level actually lowers as the battery drains. It’s a very cool trick, but it causes the tablet to be noticeably sluggish, especially when changing the screen orientation, and likely causes the actual battery to drain even faster. Beyond all that, Asus bundles a lot of its own apps, including MyNet (a DLNA assistant), MyCloud (which includes unlimited storage for a year), MyLibrary, and @vibe. Splashtop’s MyDesktop is included in the MyCloud app for remote desktop control, and while it could have been quite useful with this form factor, its was rather sluggish when I tried to control a Windows 7 laptop. On top of that, it requires the PC and Slider to be on the same network, which sort of defeats the entire purpose.

Other than all that, you’re looking at the familiar Honeycomb experience, and as I mentioned above, the keyboard plays quite well with the operating system, morphing the device into more of a workhorse than most of the tablets out there. I wouldn’t say it’s a "laptop replacement," but it’s certainly worthy of the "netbook replacement" moniker. I was able to write the entirety of this review on the system while simultaneously listening to Pandora, checking my Gmail, chatting in Google Talk, and periodically looking things up on the Web. It’s more than capable at multitasking, though I have to say I wish Honeycomb handled navigation between multiple programs better.

Of course, before I end the software section, I need to add the now-standard Honeycomb ecosystem note. In fact, every time I review one of these tablets, I hope there will be some better apps in the Market and I’ll no longer have to add this part, but I’m continuously disappointed. Yes, there are the apps you need to get by — Twitter and Facebook phone apps, news reader apps (like Pulse), and a slew of games — but very few of them provide the immersive experience of any of the iPad apps and many of them continue to be unstable. I got two always-delightful Force Close warnings in Plume this time around.

Performance, battery

The Slider has the same internals as the Transformer and most of its Honeycomb tablet compatriots — a dual-core 1GHz Tegra 2 processor, 1GB of RAM, and 16GB of local storage. For the most part, performance is on par with the other dual-core Honeycomb tablets, meaning the internals are peppy enough to push along the OS and a number of applications. However, as you’ve probably gleaned from parts of the review, there’s some noticeable sluggishness when it comes to heavy animation aspects, including the wallpaper and an overload of widgets. That aside, the presence of the keyboard means you’ll likely be pushing this thing to its multitasking limits, yet I still found switching between open applications to be quite smooth and running multiple apps at a time to be no issue. The only real issue is stability of some apps.

The Transformer blew all the other tablets away in terms of battery life because of the dock’s extra cell, but sadly, the Slider cannot claim the same power efficiency. On The Verge battery test, which cycles through a series of websites and high resolution images with brightness set at 65 percent, the Slider petered out at five hours and 50 minutes — just ten minutes shy of a full six hours. That’s shorter than the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the iPad, although I was able to get closer to six and a half hours during regular use. The tablet does seem to charge up fairly quickly but the placement of the 40-pin charging port on the rear left-side is awkward and the charging cable wound up getting lodged between the tablet and the keyboard when I’d snap the device back into tablet mode. It seems like something that could have been solved by placing it on one of the edges.